Tag Archives: Avid

One key way of speeding up the Flicker Free plugin is putting it first in the order of effects. What does this mean? Let’s say you’re using the Lumetri Color Corrector in Premiere. You want to apply Flicker Free first, then apply Lumetri. You’ll see about a 300+% speed increase vs. doing it with Lumetri first. So it looks like this:

Why the Speed Difference?

Flicker Free has to analyze multiple frames to de-flicker the footage you’re using. It looks at up to 21 frames. If you have the effect applied before Flicker Free it means Lumetri is being applied TWENTY ONE times for every frame Flicker Free renders. And especially with a slow effect like Lumetri that will definitely slow everything down.

It fact, on slower machines it can bring Premiere to a grinding halt. Premiere has to render the other effect on 21 frames in order to render just one frame for Flicker Free. In this case, Flicker Free takes up a lot of memory, the other effect can take up a lot of memory and things start getting ugly fast.

Renders with Happy Endings

So to avoid this problem, just apply Flicker Free before any other effects. This goes for pretty much every video editing app. The render penalty will vary depending on the host app and what effect(s) you have applied. For example, using the Fast Color Corrector in Premiere Pro resulted in a slow down of only about 10% (vs. Lumetri and a slow down of 320%). In After Effects the slow down was about 20% with just the Synthetic Aperture color corrector that ships with AE. However, if you add more filters it can get a lot worse.

Either way, you’ll have much happier render times if you put Flicker Free first.

Hopefully this makes some sense. I’ll go into a few technical details for those that are interested. (Feel free to stop reading if it’s clear you just need to put Flicker Free first) (oh, and here are some other ways of speeding up Flicker Free)

Technical Details

With all host applications, Flicker Free, like all plugins, has to request frames through the host application API. With most plugins, like the Beauty Box Video plugin, the plugin only needs to request the current frame. You want to render frame X: Premiere Pro (or Avid, FCP, etc) has to load the frame, render any plugins and then display it. Plugins get rendered in the order you apply them. Fairly straightforward.

The Flicker Free plugin is different. It’s not JUST looking at the current frame. In order to figure out the correct luminance for each pixel (thus removing flicker) it has to look at pixels both before and after the current frame. This means it has to ask the API for up to 21 frames, analyze them, return the result to Premiere, which then finishes rendering the current frame.

So the API says, “Yes, I will do your bidding and get those 21 frames. But first, I must render them!”. And so it does. If there are no plugins applied to them, this is easy. It just hands Flicker Free the 21 original frames and goes on its merry way. If there are plugins applied, the API has to render those on each frame it gives to Flicker Free. FF has to wait around for all 21 frames to be rendered before it can render the current frame. It waits, therefore that means YOU wait. If you need a long coffee break these renders can be great. If not, they are frustrating.

If you use After Effects you may be familiar with pre-comping a layer with effects so that you can use it within a plugin applied to a different layer. This goes through a different portion of the API than when a plugin requests frames programmatically from AE. In the case of a layer in the layer pop-up the plugin just gets the original image with no effects applied. If the plugin actually asks AE for the frame one frame before it, AE has to render it.

One other thing that affects speed behind the scenes… some apps are better at caching frames that plugins ask for than other apps. After Effects does this pretty well, Premiere Pro less so. So this helps AE have faster render times when using Flicker Free and rendering sequentially. If you’re jumping around the timeline then this matters less.

Hopefully this helps you get better render times from Flicker Free. The KEY thing to remember however, is ALWAYS APPLY FLICKER FREE FIRST!

We’re excited to announce that Beauty Box Video 4.0 is now available for Avid and OpenFX Apps: Davinci Resolve, Assimilate Scratch, Sony Vegas, NUKE, and more. This is in addition to After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro which were announced in April.

Beauty Box Video 4.0 adds real time rendering to the high quality, automatic skin retouching that Beauty Box is famous for. It’s not only the best retouching plugin available but it’s now one of the fastest, especially on newer graphics cards like the Nvidia GTX 980. We’re seeing real time or near real time performance in Premiere Pro, Resolve, and FCP. Other apps may not see quite that performance but they still get a significant speed increase over what was possible in Beauty Box 3.0.

Easily being able to retouch video is becoming increasingly important. HD is everywhere and 4K is widely available allowing viewers to see more detail on closeups of talent than ever before. This makes skin or makeup problems much more visible and being able to apply digital makeup easily is critical to high quality productions.

Beauty Box will smooth out all skin areas, so blemishes on arms are covered up as well as wrinkles or spots on the face, as you can see in this still from a cooking show.

You can also incorporate masks to limit the retouching to just certain areas like cheeks or the talent’s forehead. (as can be seen in this tutorial using Premiere Pro’s tracking masks)

So head over to digitalanarchy.com for more info and to download a free trial and free tutorials on how to get started and more advanced topics. You’ll be blown away by the ease of use, high quality retouching, and now… speed!

We have a Sony FS700 hanging around the Digital Anarchy office for shooting slow motion and 4K footage to test with our various plugins ( We develop video plugins for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Avid, Final Cut Pro, Resolve, etc., etc.) . In order to get 4K out of the camera we had to buy an Odyssey 7Q+ from Convergent Designs (don’t you love how all these cameras are ‘4K – capable’, meaning if you want 4K, it’s another $2500+. Yay for marketing.)

(btw… if you don’t care about the back story, and just want to know how to import a corrupted .wav file into a video editing app, then just jump to the last couple paragraphs. I won’t hold it against you. :-)

The 7Q+ overall is a good video recorder and we like it a lot but we recently ran into a problem. One of the videos we shot didn’t have sound. It had sound when played back on the 7Q+, but when you imported it into any video editing application. no audio.

The 7Q+ records 4K as a series of .dng files with a sidecar .wav file for the audio. The wav file had the appropriate size as if it had audio data (it wasn’t a 1Kb file or something) but importing into FCP, Premiere Pro, Quicktime, or Windows Media Player showed no waveform and no audio.

Convergent Designs wasn’t particularly helpful. The initial suggestion was to ‘rebuild’ the SSD drives. This was suggested multiple times, as if it was un-imaginable this wouldn’t fix it and/or I was an idiot not doing it correctly. The next suggestion was to buy file recovery software. This didn’t really make sense either. The .dng files making up the video weren’t corrupted, the 7Q+ could play it back, and the file was there with the appropriate size. It seemed more likely that the 7Q+ wrote the file incorrectly, in which case file recovery software would do nothing.

So Googling around for people with similar problems I discovered 1) at least a couple other 7Q users have had the same problem and 2) there were plenty of non-7Q users with corrupted .wav files. One technique for the #2 folks was to pull them into VLC Media Player. Would this work for the 7Q+?

YES! Pull it into VLC, then save it out as a different .wav (or whatever) file. It then imported and played back correctly. Video clip saved and I didn’t need to return the 7Q+ to Convergent and lose it for a couple weeks.

Other than this problem the Odyssey 7Q+ has been great… but this was a pretty big problem. Easily fixed though thanks to VLC.

Due to popular demand, we are porting Beauty Box far and wide. Even farther than you might imagine, but you’ll hear more about that over the next few weeks.

For now, we have builds of Beauty Box for Avid and Nuke that we think are working well. We need some folks who actually use these host apps on a regular basis to verify that for us. So if you (or someone you know) might be interested in beta testing, please drop me an email at jim@nulldigitalanarchy.com. Please let me know what platform/program you’re on, if you’ve beta tested before, if you’ve used Beauty Box with other host apps, and if you like fruitcake. We’re pretty flexible about who we allow to beta test, but I draw the line at fruitcake. With eggnog we have a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. Champagne and snickerdoodles are fine by us though.

We’re very excited about both these apps, so we’re looking forward to getting Beauty Box out there.